


The Body

by Loudest_Voice



Series: The Legend of God's Eyes [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autopsy, Dead Body, Gen, Gift Fic, Gore, Non-Massacre AU, Post-Mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-13 07:18:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7967530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loudest_Voice/pseuds/Loudest_Voice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A missing-nin dies while trapped under one of Itachi's genjutsu. He knows that it sounds impressive, but they'd been sent to capture her. It's really not much of a catastrophe, but when Itachi kills someone, he likes to know how the hell he did it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luvsanime02](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/gifts).



> [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02)'s birthday is coming up! My only chance of getting her a gift fic out is to start it early, so here we go. This is also unbeta'd because I'm posting the first part before going back to work tomorrow.
> 
> This is not what I originally promised, but I hope you like it anyway :)
> 
> Also, there's a possibility that this will be "gory", but my threshold about that is pretty damned high because of my job. Anyone who doesn't want to read fairly graphic description of a dead body should probably skip this one.

Itachi doesn’t mean to kill that missing-nin. It. . . worries him. Some might say that the woman’s blank, wide, dark green eyes stopped him cold (or they might if they were talking about anyone else), but it isn't the frozen terror in her dead face that gives Itachi pause. It’s never a good sign when a ninja starts killing people by mistake.

“Did you do this with—” Deer cuts himself off. He scratches the back of his head, then huffs. “Genjutsu?”

“No,” says Itachi. 

“Well, there’s not a scratch on her.” Antelope rises to his feet as he pats the bag every medic strap to their waist before every mission. He never got to use any of his drugs. Or maybe he just chose not to. 

Itachi has to check the resuscitation protocol during missions. “Poison?” he asks, looking down at the body. Green eyes stare back at him. He has to be imagining it, and not just because it’s a moonless sky full of clouds shielding them from the stars. There’s nobody in there left to stare.

“Checked for that.” Antelope shakes his head. “Clean as a virgin spring, which is actually surprising considering we’re dealing with an Orochimaru underling. Usually, their blood’s sludged up with bullshit.”

“Maybe she committed suicide to avoid interrogation,” suggests Deer.

No. Itachi had caught her before she collapsed. Though she had not trembled or cried, she’d begged. _Please don’t this._ Quiet, pleading, and touching her stomach. 

“Not with poison, she didn’t,” says Antelope. “And if she’d stabbed herself somewhere vital, then she’d be in a pool of blood.”

The grass under the body smells pristine, like those candles that promise to waft a room with spring rain, but better. Authentic. The earth beneath their feet is firm.

“So, that leaves the genjutsu?” Deer can’t help but make it a question.

A question that Itachi cannot answer. He had used genjutsu, yes, but with the intent to trigger a generic panic attack. Orochimaru’s kunoichi would have _felt_ like she was dying. And then she had actually died. If panic attacks could literally kill people, then shinobi all over the world would be dropping like flies.

He has no choice but to continue the mission as though nothing is out of the ordinary. With any luck, Deer and Antelope will assume that Ibiki gave him alternate orders, and that he meant to kill the missing-nin. 

Of course, there are no alternate orders. Ibiki has made it his mission in life, and in the lives of all competent jounin, to capture (and preferably kill) Orochimaru. The old bastard knows Konoha like the back of his hand, geographically speaking. At one point, he’d had access to every secret library in the village. The missing-nin would have been their first concrete lead in more than a year. 

Itachi can’t even muster the customary annoyance when Ibiki fixes him with an unimpressed glare. “If nothing else, you’re usually subtle,” he says, a frown harshening his scars. 

“I can’t kill anyone with genjutsu,” says Itachi.

“If anyone can, it’s you.” It’s not a compliment. Ibiki knows that an out-of-control weapon is worse than no weapon at all. 

Itachi takes longer than usual in the ANBU showers. Water, a touch too hot to be comfortable, sluices over his skin. He is not fond of water, but he can’t return home until he has the beginnings of a solution. Well, not a solution, since dead is dead, but the beginnings of an answer, at least. His genjutsu did not kill that woman; that much he knows. But something clearly did.

The answer comes to him when he’s outside in the locker room, drying between his toes to prevent a fungal infection. Eiji’s voice—and it’s more than a little annoying that he recognizes that voice so readily—reaches him. It’s just babble about some funny incident or another, but it’s not what he says that matters. Or even him specifically.

Itachi will request an autopsy. No, he will _order_ one. 

He’s starting at the door when Eiji walks in, waving goodbye to whoever he’d been speaking to. Itachi keeps staring when he catches Eiji’s eyes. Most people would balk at the eye-contact, even though niceties dictate that Itachi is the one who has made a faux pas. Itachi keeps staring anyway. Eiji stares back, his face dancing from confused, to indignant, and back to confused again.

“Can I help you?” asks Eiji. His tone isn’t particularly nice, but Itachi knows what he sounds like when he’s going for maximum unpleasantness.

“You already have.”

“Alright,” says Eiji, raising his palms in surrender as he shrugs. “You’re welcome.”

Getting the autopsy is much harder than Itachi anticipated. The med corp is perpetually understaffed, and the med-chuunin manning the information station at the hospital informs him that an autopsy is much more time-consuming and specialized than whatever he might be envisioning. Itachi is not envisioning much of anything, but he’s pleased to learn that autopsies are complicated. He might get his answers after all.

“I don’t care that you’re a jounin,” says the med-chuunin behind the information window. Itachi feels like his mother (or someone else’s mother, to be more accurate; someone with a mother who chopped off all her hair in a man’s cut) is talking down to him. “I care that you’re an ANBU captain even less. You don’t have the authority to waltz in here and tell us what to do.”

“This is important,” tries Itachi.

“Everybody thinks their issues are important,” says the med-chuunin. “There are still only twenty-four hours in a day. You’ll get your autopsy if you can find a medic with forensic training with four of them to spare.”

“I’ll do it.”

Discipline keeps Itachi from revealing his surprise, but he still glances towards Eiji’s voice. Eiji practically bounces towards him, a playful move that looks absurd on someone taller than everyone in the room. He smiles at Itachi, bright and genuine, as though they’re friends sharing a private joke.

“You have clinic duty,” says the other med-chuunin, unimpressed.

“But you heard the Captain,” says Eiji. “This is important, and I’m also in ANBU, remember?”

“Like you know enough pathology to do a microscopic examination.”

“So what?” Eiji shrugs. “It’s an autopsy. Ninety-percent of the time, we get what we get out of the gross anyway.”

“No,” says the med-chuunin.

“I’m ordering him to do it,” says Itachi. “ANBU mission.” It’s what he should have done in the first place. The incident must have affected him more than he realized.

The med-chuunin gives him a flat look. “He’s going to need an assistant.”

“He can be my assistant,” says Eiji. “Please, relax.”

“I can be his assistant,” agrees Itachi.

A line is gathering behind them. The med-chuunin glares, then rolls her eyes. “I don’t have time to deal with you assholes. And by the way,” she adds, looking at Eiji, “this is why everyone hates you.”

Itachi almost asks who “everyone” is, since he rarely sees Eiji without at least one person around laughing at his jokes. Instead, he follows Eiji deeper into the hospital, towards a narrow set of stairs leading underground. 

“Not the best place for a morgue, if you ask me,” says Eiji as they push through a set of heavy double-doors and into a hallway bathed in sallow light. “But nobody ever does. So, who are we opening up?”

Itachi doesn’t know the woman’s name, but it’s hardly worth mentioning such an insignificant detail. He tells Eiji as much as he can, which isn’t much, as Eiji sets up the autopsy suite. It’s chilly, but mercifully clean. Though even that is a little unsettling. The entire suite is obviously well-used, but pristine in a way that indicates that someone’s in charge of soaking every nook and cranny in bleach and ammonia. To the side, there’s a shelf with gloves, surgical gowns, and several different types of masks. 

Eiji takes off his white coat and hangs it on a hook beside the shelf, then reaches for a set of disposable gloves. “She just dropped dead?” asks Eiji, gesturing at Itachi to get some gloves himself.

“Yes,” says Itachi, wishing he had more to say. The gloves slide over his fingers easily enough, but he hates them anyway. It’s just a thin, flexible layer of blue latex, but it still muffles his hands, specially the pads of his fingers. He remembers going on a mission to the Land of Ice and despising the leather gloves that had protected him from frostbite, but made his aim slightly less perfect. 

“Supposedly, you’ve got the best genjutsu in the world,” says Eiji, laying down a large basin with a red, heavy-duty trash bag over it at the foot of the metallic slab that Itachi guesses is the autopsy table. It sits at a slight incline, and there are steel cutting boards arranged on its surface. A crown of steel frames it, full of evenly-spaced holes. 

Itachi worries that it looks uncomfortable, then he berates himself for the stupid thought. It’s not like anyone alive ever lies on it. “I don’t think my genjutsu killed her,” he says.

“Obviously not,” says Eiji, opening the faucet at the foot of the table, just beyond where he’d placed the basin with the red trash bag. Water passes over the steel surface to drain at a sink at the opposite end of the table. Somehow, Itachi knows that it’s cold. It would save energy. “But she still died.”

“I want to know why,” says Itachi.

“Well.” Eiji sighs, gazing at Itachi with an uncomfortably soft expression that edges too close to pity. “Autopsies can tell you how someone died, but the why’s a little trickier. This might not get you the answer you want.”

Itachi frowns. He had not understood the brief conversation between Eiji and the med-chuunin at the information window, not really, but he’s hoping that if Eiji finds anything interesting from a forensic perspective, it will be easier to get a med-jounin on board. But that assumes that Eiji has a baseline level of competency. 

“How many autopsies have you performed?”

“Dozens!” Eiji grunts and rolls his eyes. “I’ve assisted in dozens; done like. . . three myself.”

“Great.”

“Jeez, try help out an asshole. . .” Eiji shakes his head, then turns around. “I’ll go get the body before they cremate it.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My plans for the weekend kinda fell through, so I finished this chapter instead. Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading the first half. The second half is unbeta'ed.

Itachi starts exploring the moment Eiji’s footsteps have faded (though he shouldn’t trample around like an elephant; what kind of ninja is he?). There’s a whiteboard on the wall engraved with labels that waver between innocuous and ominous _(NUMBER, EXT, CHEST, PERICARD, PERITONEUM, HEART, RV, LV, SEPTUM, TV, PV, MV, AV, LL, RL, LIVER, RK, LK)_. Medics and their abbreviations. Under the whiteboard, there’s a table with blue towels and assorted handles for disposable surgical blades. It’s obvious what those are for, but Itachi can’t work out when or why a long cord of thick string will be necessary during an autopsy. 

Footsteps reach him, prompting Itachi to look around faster. The lack of windows makes him yearn for trees, even though he’s far from claustrophobic. There are two deep sinks besides the one at the foot of the autopsy table/bed, three different bulbs flooding the room with sickly yellow light, a digital scale with a thin soaking pad over it, and three separate garbage cans as tall as his waist. There’s an extension cord hanging from the ceiling, right above the autopsy table. He notices the drawers under said table for the first time, and wishes that Eiji wasn’t about to burst through the door. It’s cold enough that he’s tempted to use his chakra to keep himself a little warmer.

“Hey, don’t just stand there!” snaps Eiji, as he pushes the door open. “Help me with the gurney.”

Itachi steps forward, though Eiji is certainly big enough to kick the door open as he pushes the gurney through. Or he could make one measly Shadow Clone, but he just loves whining. Better to help him get the gurney beside the autopsy table with as little fuss as possible. Itachi is supposed to assist him anyway. 

The body bag is white, in contrast to the black Itachi had expected. Its zipper gets caught on itself, and rips off when Eiji grunts and pulls harder. “Cheap piece of shit,” mumbles Eiji, then just rips it open. The body’s not rotting yet. Of course not. It’s been maybe twenty hours, and most of those she’s been in a freezer. 

“Damn, look at all those tattoos,” says Eiji, sighing. “The external’s gonna take forever.”

Itachi would ask what “the external” is, but he’ll find out quickly enough. They slide her onto the steel table, a move that takes a second longer because her joints are stiff. Dead weight/rigor mortis, Itachi thinks, and it almost makes him smile. ANBU gets called in when an apartment starts stinking, or when a landlord is upset about late rent. He knows more about decomposing bodies than he gives himself credit for.

“Get a clipboard and a blank diagram from the desk drawer,” orders Eiji, reaching for one of the scissors on the table with all the blade holders. 

The blank diagrams are of generic human bodies a couple of steps above stick figures, front and back. The figures strike Itachi as oddly “male”, even though the front diagram lacks genitalia. Another pointless detail. He’s been noticing too many of those since the mission. 

“Are you lost in there?” demands Eiji. “Listen and write.”

Itachi blinks, then grabs the clipboard and slides one of the blank diagrams onto it. He grabs one of the pens by the telephone and takes Eiji’s dictations. Curly, dark brown hair. Green irises and maximally dilated pupils, bilaterally. No blood or fluid in the ears or nose. Missing tooth number four. Eiji sticks his gloved fingers inside her mouth for that last one. 

Then comes the descriptions of all those damned tattoos. A bird just under her left clavicle. A rose wrapped in barbed wire on her left shoulder with “Shiho” in blocky font right under it. A kunai dripping blood between her breasts. A butterfly on her right hip. Barbed wire making three rounds around her right thigh. Thin lines on her left shin which Itachi doesn’t recognize as senbon until Eiji identifies them as such. How stupid. Had the woman known that, one day, a medic would have to spend time meticulously measuring and describing all the nonsense she inked onto her body? 

“Alright, now her back,” says Eiji, making vague gestures.

It takes Itachi a few more seconds, but he puts the clipboard on the edge of the table, keeping away from the sluicing water and making sure not to touch the body, then grabs its shoulder. Eiji grabs his hand and places it on her hip, then pushes the body so it’s lying on its side.

“She was from Kumo!” says Eiji, reaching over for the clipboard.

Itachi wants to let go, to switch places with Eiji so he can walk around and examine the body’s back. There’s at least one more tattoo; one of a cloud being pierced by lightning, at the small of her back. What would a Kumo kunoichi want with Orochimaru and his ilk? 

“Wow, these are pretty nice,” Eiji says, as Itachi looks at the dead woman’s face, chasing after any signs of Kumo in her wavy brown hair and light skin. “You an artist?”

“No,” says Itachi, glancing at the tattoos he drew on the diagrams. They’re a close-enough likeness, but he’d been working with a cheap ballpoint pen.

“You’re kidding, right?” says Eiji. “Most people just scribble dots and shit on these, then describe the scars/tattoos/bruises/etc. It must have taken you a while to get this good at drawing.”

“A few seconds,” corrects Itachi. “I copied an artist during one of my missions a few years ago.”

“Oh.” Eiji frowns, then turns his attention to the woman’s back.

Itachi almost backpedals and explains that it was actually close to a year of practice. People don’t understand the Sharingan at all. Copying the artist lets him replicate exactly the few strokes of the pen he saw, but translating that context-less bit of motion into something useful still took hours and hours of study. And he has never attained the original artist’s innate skill. He probably never will. Since maiming his family, he’s found no joy in a silly drawing hobby. 

A sigh threatens to leave his mouth. He has to resist an urge to fidget. Eiji’s taking way too long. Can’t he just take a glance and remember the woman’s back? Itachi would stand on the tips of his toes, or lean forward, but he doesn’t want to interrupt. Slowly or not, Eiji’s doing him a favor.

“Alright, done,” says Eiji, about two long minutes later. He leans back, and Itachi gently lays the body on its back again. “Let’s go—Wait, I almost always forget this part. Avert your virgin gaze, sir.”

Itachi takes the clipboard, then looks on as Eiji reaches for the woman’s knees. They don’t bend, so Eiji just pulls the leg open and gestures at Itachi to do the same with the other side. Then Eiji reaches for the woman’s genitals with his big hand, and Itachi is forced to actively look at it, to note that her pubic hair is slightly darker than the hair on her head, among other things. 

“You know all those sayings that women are better smugglers?” Eiji says, as he inserts two fingers into her vagina. 

Itachi leaps at the excuse to look away and stares up at his face. 

“If you ask me, it’s because they have an extra body cavity.” Eiji’s not looking down either, though Itachi doubts that it’s because inserting his fingers into a dead woman’s vagina ruffles his sensibilities. His eyebrows are furrowed in concentration, just like any new genin trainee’s are when they’re first learning to handle kunai. “Nothing. Turn her over again so I can do a rectal exam.”

There’s nothing in the woman’s rectum either, so Eiji arranges the body back into a semi-dignified, neutral position and gestures Itachi towards one of the sinks away from the autopsy table. “This is either gonna be a ruptured aneurysm or a massive pulmonary. I’ll do the brain first so if it’s that, we can call it a day.”

“Why not just do the whole thing?” asks Itachi, pushing aside more specific questions for the moment.

“Why bother with all that if we just want to find out why she died?” Eiji shrugs as he rips off his gloves, then opens the faucet by stepping on switch on the floor. “If I play my cards right, I might be done here by noon.”

Itachi bites back any comments about laziness because, again, Eiji’s all he’s got for this. He follows Eiji to an adjacent room, only half-listening to his complaints about clinic duty.

“You should change into scrubs,” Eiji tells him when he reaches for one of the surgical gowns. “If it wasn’t an aneurysm, this whole thing’s gonna get shittier and bloodier. Mostly shittier. Second drawer on the right. You look like a small.”

Itachi shrugs and gets a set of lime green scrubs, then starts taking off his clothes. 

“You know, Ibiki usually asks for autopsies for everyone who might’ve been associated with Orochimaru,” says Eiji, as he slips on a pair of disposable boots that end mid-calf. At least on him. “That’s how I got most of my forensic training. You wouldn’t believe the shit you find on these people’s tox screens, or the weird body alterations. It’s like. . . _eugh_. And I used to think that guy wasn’t so bad.”

“You knew Orochimaru?” asks Itachi, pulling his mesh shirt over his head.

“Personally? Nah.” Eiji sighs. “But some of the other kids at the Red Lights District—the ones that actually looked like kids—they had nice things to say about him. He paid well, never hit them, didn’t always fuck them, that sort of thing. Put your hair in a tight bun; trust me, you don’t want dead fluids in all that pretty hair.”

Itachi pauses, so briefly that Eiji hopefully didn’t notice. His hair is pretty, he supposes. Like his mother’s. “He was still a pedophile.”

“I’m not nominating the guy for a prize,” says Eiji, reaching for a surgical gown, “but do you there are pedos who don’t even fuck children, just hurt them? Hurt them really bad, sometimes straight up killing them? Look at it that way, and Orochimaru’s loads less disgusting. Makes it a little easier to get through the day.”

“Did you ever deal with those kinds yourself?” asks Itachi. Then he silently berates himself for the unnecessary prying.

“Me?” Eiji laughs. “I was an ugly, nasty little kid. Then puberty hit me like an avalanche of bricks, and I’ve looked thirty since I was ten. My mamma used to say someone must have stolen her kid and replaced him with some has-been spy from another village. Then she died and someone decided I’m big enough to be of some use to the army. How about you?”

“What?” The scrubs are flimsy, like years-old pyjamas. 

“Did you know Orochimaru? Seems to me like you’d been in his circle, being in the superhuman badass tier of shinobi.” Eiji throws around praises, if that’s what being called a ‘superhuman badass’ is, as matter-of-factly as he complains about the weather.

“I’m only fifteen,” says Itachi. “Orochimaru defected the year I graduated from the Academy. You’d have been nine or ten by then; just about the right age that he’d have preyed on you if he was preying on your friends.”

“I’m telling you, I wasn’t his type,” says Eiji. “Around then, I made a living stealing from my mother’s clients, and I wasn’t all that good. Walked around with a black eye more often than not, and had a chip on my shoulder that practically gave me scoliosis. He went for the ones that made people feel sorry for them.”

Itachi reaches for a pair of disposable boots, content to listen to Eiji’s babble, for once.

“There was this kid—shit, don’t even remember his name anymore—he was shooting up by eleven, and had the biggest blue eyes you’d ever seen. Looking back on it, that’s probably because he was underweight and his bones jutted out everywhere, but anyway. He was a mean motherfucker. Worked out that if his johns died, he could just raid their wallets and make more profit. And in the daytime, or during the weekends that weren’t close to payday for most people, he panhandled around the edges of the Red Lights District. He could con and pickpocket more money than the rest of us combined. Orochimaru used to _love_ that kid.”

“What happened to him?” asks Itachi, as he slips on one of the surgical gowns. Even flimsier than the scrubs, but with a plastic quality to them. An excellent barrier for fluids, Itachi guesses.

“Overdosed, probably,” says Eiji, shrugging. “Listen, double glove and put these to good use.” He hands Itachi a pair of white disposable sleeves. “Put on a mask, then a plastic shield to protect your eyes. The smell, we can’t do anything about, but it’s better if you assume that everyone’s trying to give you hepatitis and TB.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02)'s birthday passed and I didn't get to finish this. And it's also gonna be longer than three chapters because, as usual, I underestimated just how much description would go into this. Oops. Good practice for describing things, I suppose. I don't think I'm very good at it.

“I’m gonna do the brain first, because if she just blew a big artery somewhere,” says Eiji, as he pushes through to the room with the autopsy table, “I’m not doing anything else.”

“You said Ibiki usually asks for autopsies for anyone associated with Orochimaru.” The body is right where they left it, staring up at the ceiling.

“And if that happens, then someone will thank me for doing part of this.” Eiji grabs a wide, thick block of wood painted brown, then walks towards the autopsy table.

For a moment, Itachi thinks that he will bash the woman’s head in, but he grabs the head and slips the wooden block under the woman’s shoulder blades. Her head hangs down, which does something complicated to the muscles of her neck that pulls her mouth slightly open. Maybe Itachi’s just imagining it.

“Besides,” continues Eiji, loading a thin blade onto a scalpel holder, “Ibiki just wants us to make sure we’re not dealing with a mule.” He grabs the woman’s curly hair, beginning to hum a tune that Itachi doesn’t recognize, and parts half of the brown curls over the woman’s face. Then he makes a slick cut through the woman’s cranium, from one ear to the other. A trickle of blood stains the blade.

Itachi almost takes off the plastic face-shield before he remembers that his eyes aren’t playing tricks on him. Dead bodies don’t bleed, certainly not as much as skull lacerations tend to gush. It makes him wonder what the plastic face-shield is for.

Eiji scalps the woman with a blunt piece of metal that probably has a special name. He peels at the woman’s forehead until just before her eye sockets are visible, then rips off the back side of her scalp. Her skull is tannish-white, with flecks of pink flesh in the lines where the skin and muscles insert into the bones. Still humming, Eiji walks around the autopsy table, to the side with the drawers that Itachi did not get a chance to open.

He produces a goddamn saw. It should not be so surprising, but somehow, it is. Itachi really wishes he’d inspected those drawers before, or at least had the good sense to stand on the same side as them once they returned to the room. There’s an outlet hooked to a cable on the ceiling, and Eiji is so tall that he doesn’t need a stepping stool to connect the saw. An electric whirl invades the room, then Eiji nods to himself and walks back to the head of the autopsy table.

He grabs the scalp over the woman’s face to get some leverage, then drives the saw into the woman’s skull. The whirring noise becomes duller as the bone cracks. It would be easier to use chakra to crack the woman’s skull. Itachi once fought a missing-nin from Cloud who took him by surprise (it happens every once in awhile, when Itachi goes days and days without sleeping). He’d focused chakra into his arm reflexively, and bashed the man’s head against a concrete wall reinforced with steel. Clear fluid and blood had burst from the missing-nin’s nostrils. Later, the squad medic scalped the man with a kunai and peeled off fragments of skull. She’d wanted to study depressed skull fractures. Itachi had meant to look up the words, but the curiosity had escaped him by the time they returned home.

The anatomy of the brain had been disturbed, and Itachi supposes that the point of an autopsy is. . . organized disruption. Eiji goes around the woman’s exposed skull, pops out the top like it’s an insect’s carapace, sticks his two middle fingers between the cracks, and pulls gently. The brain comes out with the top of the skull. Eiji grabs his scalpel and slices through a series of nerves, then right under the brainstem, where the spinal cord begins. Itachi knows this particular bit of anatomy, though from the outside, because it’s one of the vital spots to aim for when an instant kill is necessary. Well, it’s _the_ spot to aim for, right at the base of the neck.

It’s apparently possible to survive a cut there, but the victim will be paralyzed. That’s as good as dead for almost anyone. Itachi would still have genjutsu, but he’d have very little opportunity to use it.

“Well, nothing impressive here,” says Eiji, sighing.

Itachi begs to differ. He’s never seen the base of a skull, has never given it any thought at all. There’s less blood than he would have guessed, concentrated on ridges that Itachi’s never imagined. The back grooves are almost pristine. Two tan . . . wires. They look like wires, but white and flat, are attempting to crisscross on the upper half. Itachi tries to follow their path, and frowns.

“Are those the. . . eye nerves?” he asks. His breath becomes trapped behind his mask, hot and uncomfortable. “Do they cross?”

“Optic nerves,” corrects Eiji. “And almost everything crosses in the brain—decussates is the fancy word for it; something to do with embryology I don’t care about. I’m not even gonna bother with the meninges. It wasn’t an aneurysm. Not here, at least.”

He goes for a bucket and fills it with fluid from a container labeled “formalin”, a name that Itachi vaguely recognizes as toxic. Even if he didn’t, there’s a helpful skulls-and-bones insignia branded on the side of the container.

“I’m gonna save it anyway ‘cause. . .” He trails off as he picks up the brain, which is even less bloody than the skull itself, and deposits it into the white bucket. “Whatever, like you care.”

Itachi detects a bit of random bitterness there, but he doesn’t care to delve deeper. He frowns when Eiji seals the brain bucket, wishing he’d had more time to observe the dips and hills on the brain’s surface, but ultimately bites his tongue.

“You any good at sewing?” asks Eiji.

“Passable.” He’d seen one of his distant aunts patching a shirt sometime before becoming a genin, right around the time when he’d activated his Sharingan at every opportunity. Years later, he had killed her.

“Sew the skull back into her scalp,” says Eiji, walking around the head of the table to stand by the body’s side. “Couple of stitches however is fine. Not like she’s getting a funeral.”

Itachi’s first instinct is to ask for further instruction, but he’s always liked solving problems on his own. He looks around while Eiji makes the first incision, just under the woman’s clavicle, and heads straight for the string that he’d wondered about before. The grey, curved hooks beside it give him pause, but he supposes skin is tougher than cloth.

The top of the woman’s skull fits back over the base, but it doesn’t slide into place. The saw ground away without a care for preservation of the joints, if they can be called that, so Itachi holds the cauldron-like bone in place with one hand, and rolls the scalp into place with the other. He criss-crosses the grey string through the tough skin, trying to hide it with the woman’s hair, as Eiji peels away the skin, fat, and muscle of her chest and exposes her ribs. Her face is undamaged, as human as it’d been before Eiji scalped her, and that’s somehow worse than if she’d been deformed.

Eiji’s by the belly once Itachi finishes a fourth and last stitch in the woman’s scalp. He makes a midline cut, slices around the belly button, then finishes just above her pubic hair. There’s a sheet of fat over the entrails, yellow and covered with a few fine, spider-web-like blood vessels. Or Itachi assumes that’s what they are. He knows for a fact that the woman’s blood isn’t in a field or ditch somewhere, so why isn’t she bleeding? There might not be a heartbeat anymore, but the blood didn’t just evaporate out of her.

It doesn’t smell like anything. It’s true that she’s been dead for maybe twelve hours, counting the time it took to get back to the village, report back to Ibiki, shower, decide to request the autopsy, and finally run into Eiji, so that’s to be expected. But Itachi doesn’t expect it. He’s rarely close to people when he kills them—genjutsu and shurikenjutsu serves him well—but he’s had to open people up up via the belly once or twice. Or a dozen times. It's not uncommon for people to soil themselves in their last moment. Blood has a coppery scent, but it seems the stink of chemicals masks it in an autopsy room.

The hum of Eiji’s tune returns, loud enough to be heard over the trickle of the water sluicing over the autopsy table as Eiji strides over to the other side. He grabs the edge of the meat over the woman’s ribs with a pair of forceps that have teeth-like hooks at the end, then moves the scalpel just over the bone. Itachi drinks in the sight, too polite to use his Sharingan, though he doubts Eiji would notice if he did.

He seems to have forgotten Itachi’s presence altogether. It’s not surprising. Itachi’s greatest strength is not his eyes, or even his alleged brilliance, but his ability to vanish in plain sight. So he stands quietly, gloved hands stained by a few droplets of pitiful blood, and watches as his latest victim’s organs are exposed.

Eiji angles the tip of the blade away from the woman’s skin. If Itachi focuses properly, he can hear the scalpel scraping against the rib bones. Habit, probably. He guesses that Eiji wouldn’t want to mutilate the skin of a body with a family waiting for it.

“Get me another scalpel,” says Eiji, interrupting his personal hum. “This one’s not cutting smooth anymore. Not that anything’s ever as smooth as chakra scalpels.” The last bit is a mumbled complaint that Itachi only barely hears.

Itachi’s relieved to be useful again, if only for a handful of seconds. Eiji takes the new blade without looking at him, mumbling an automatic ‘thanks’ that’s directed at no one, then switches out the dull scalpel.

He turns he attention towards the woman’s neck, grabs the edge of the bit of still attached to the dip between her clavicles, and starts slicing it away. The process is slightly slower, as though Eiji is more concerned with preserving the neck musculature. Caution is not a quality Itachi associates with Eiji, but he must be cautious. Destroying can be done with careless strength, but fixing anything. . . well, Itachi has no real talent for it.

Eiji leaves the triangular strip of skin attached to the lower angle of the mandible, then scans the muscles and blood vessels of the neck. “You really never touched her, did you?”

Two strips of red meat, surprisingly thin, stretch from the angles woman’s mandibles to her clavicles. Itachi swallows, but doesn’t think he feels the flex of those particular muscles. He tilts his neck, and still can’t pinpoint where they are on his own body. Almost all the sensation concentrates on his spine and throat. If not for the blood-stained gloves he’s wearing, he would touch his own neck. Eiji sighs, then cuts away at the muscles’ attachment to the clavicles. In a matter of moments, he’s stripped away an isolated bone in the middle of the neck and its associated muscles, leaving behind what Itachi assumes is the throat.

Itachi stares at the small, rectangular plates of. . . bone, maybe? He’s not used to seeing so much he doesn’t understand, especially when all of it is also inside his own body. Do people always feel so unbalanced?

He’s so absorbed in his own ignorance that Eiji’s fumbling about fades to the background, and he almost reels back when Eiji produces a pair of large garden shears from the autopsy table’s drawer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be the clumsiest "cliffhanger" I've ever devised. 
> 
> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here, and getting a little lonely. Go there is you want to read my complex thoughts about blockbuster movies.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!
> 
> When I started writing this, I didn't realize that something that took two hours at most would require this much description.

If Eiji notices Itachi’s momentary shock, he doesn’t let it interrupt his practiced motions. The garden shears are for the woman’s ribcage. Eiji slips the thick, short metal hooks around the lowest one on the right and snaps the black handles shut. The rib doesn’t stand a chance. It shatters like a twig under a destructive child’s hands. It’s exactly the same sound, only louder. Eiji repeats the motion with all of the other ribs, and less than thirty seconds later, he reaches the clavicle. There, he has to work harder to close the garden shears.

“The clavicle is stronger than the ribs?” asks Itachi, before he can help himself.

“What?” Eiji pulls the shears off the body, grunting, then walks around to the other side of the autopsy table. “Yeah, it’s part of the shoulder girdle and takes a lot of your arm weight.”

That’s easy enough to test. Itachi rolls his shoulder and, yes, the corresponding clavicle moves. He might know better if he got injured more often, but it seems to him that the ribs should be some of the strongest bones in the body. They protect his heart and lungs. 

Eiji snaps the clavicle on the other side, puts the shears aside, then slips his fingers beneath the bone where the two handles of the fractured clavicles meet. He lifts the rib cage, just like he lifted the brain, using his free hand to pull off strings of tan, fatty tissue trying their hardest to keep the bones in place. 

“Go write on the board,” says Eiji, dropping the rib cage onto the red garbage bag between the woman’s legs. “No fluid in the chest cavity; no adhesions. Then grab two of the bottles in the drawer over in that table, one red cap and one blue. One of the needles too.” 

He reaches for a pair of scissors while Itachi rushes to follow his instructions, pinches a thin sack of nearly-white flesh speckled with fat covering the heart, and starts cutting. “I’m gonna take blood cultures, just in case.” 

The bottles resemble miniature liquor flasks, complete with several milliliters of fluid at the bottom, one transparent and the other tinted yellow. And instead of a cap, they’re topped off with thick rubber rimmed by thin aluminum. Itachi lays them on the table, a few inches above the woman’s shoulder, and opens the syringe.

“You do it,” Eiji says, as he peels off more of the sack around the heart. “Stick it into the left ventricle and pull up the plunger. You only get one shot at this.”

Itachi stares at him. “Is it supposed to be obvious where the left ventricle is?”

Sighing, Eiji lifts the scissors away from the body, and sticks them into one of the holes on the rim of the table. “Forget it, I’ll do it myself. Watch.” 

Itachi very much doubts that he will ever assist on an autopsy again, but a little bit of esoteric knowledge never killed anyone. He leans forward to get a better look as Eiji lays a big hand over the surface of the heart and shifts its position with far more gentleness than he’d spared for the body so far. 

“The heart’s kinda nestled here, with the left side more posteriorly,” he explains, twisting so that the narrow, bottom portion is lifted from its spot. “Left ventricle’s the biggest chamber—I mean, unless something’s very wrong—so there’s usually some blood there that hasn’t turned into pseudo-coagulated sludge. So. . .” 

Eiji takes the syringe out of Itachi’s hand, still holding the heart slightly out of the body, and plunges the needle through the posterior surface. Red blood bordering on indigo spurts into the barrel when he retracts the plunger. Itachi’s more than familiar with the color of fresh blood, and that isn’t it.

“She probably wasn’t septic,” says Eiji, pulling the needle out. He lets go of the heart without a hint of delicacy, and reaches for one of the glass bottles. The needle doesn’t go into the bottle as easily as it’d gone into the woman’s heart. When the rotting, brownish sludge in the syringe touches the liquid at the bottom of the bottle, its color brightens to a shade closer to that of fresh blood. 

“You know,” Eiji says, squirting the rest of the blood into the second bottle, “if you were a real assistant, you could do the bowels while I check the great vessels.” He drops the syringe into a red garbage bin behind him. 

“I will. . . handle the bowels if you show me how.” Itachi steals a glance at the fat covering the entrails. It would only be the most disgusting thing he’s ever done in the literal sense. 

“That wouldn’t save time, would it?” He hands Itachi the bottles with the blood. “Put these on the table over there.”

Itachi just looks at him before grabbing the blood. It’s not like he came into this pretending to know anything about it. Eiji can either waste time teaching him to be of use, or he can do the whole thing himself. In fact, Itachi doesn’t see why he’s wrapped in plastic, forced to breathe his own exhalations behind a medical mask. 

“Don’t get uptight with me now,” says Eiji, snorting. “The right chambers look dilated, so this is looking like a massive pulmonary.”

What? Itachi looks back down at the heart. And frowns. He’s never seen one before. He has no idea what it’s supposed to look like. 

“See?” says Eiji, gesturing at the heart.

Itachi sees nothing, not even when he walks back to the autopsy table and leans down, close enough that the smell of flesh and blood gets sharper. He’s not sure if he’s ever seen _nothing_ before.

“You’ll see,” says Eiji, reaching for the scissors. “Best way to open a heart is to follow the circulation, which goes from right to left. So, the vena cavas. Superior.” He takes the wide vessel at the crown, on the right, and makes an opening with the scissors. Blood spurts out, dark red, a trickle compared to what Itachi would have expected. Eiji cuts down, pausing when the wall of the heart starts giving way. 

He takes out the scissors and moves down, to another, wider blood vessel reaching the heart from below. “Inferior,” he mumbles, cutting upwards until he meets the edge of the previous cut. “Hand me the forceps.”

Itachi does so, and Eiji lifts the flaps away from clumps of clotted blood, scrapes away with the scissors, hums to himself, and forces the scissors through the clot. “Right ventricle.” More dark blood, thick and runny at the centers. “See how thin the wall is?”

Not really. The blood hides most of the details, and his Sharingan would be no use since it’s not like the heart is moving on its own. Barely, Itachi can see a string connecting a tan flap of thin flesh to the wall of the heart. 

“When blood backs up to the ventricle, the chamber widens and it pulls on the chordae tendineae—the strings here—and that pulls the tricuspid valve open, and blood just backflows everywhere and interrupts circulation.” 

Itachi could not do this with genjutsu. It does little to soothe him.

“And for the money shot. . .” Eiji moves the forceps down, makes a V-cut upwards. “Pulmonary artery and. . .” The clot doesn’t wait for Eiji to finish the cut. A clump of blood, as perfect as if the vessel had been its cast, slips out. Eiji laughs. “Told you! Ruptured aneurysm or massive pulmonary. Here’s your answer, Captain. She threw a clot and blocked her right-sided outflow tract. It was fast, probably. You get it.”

Yes, finally. It doesn’t take a medic to grasp that blood must reach the lungs, and if there’s clotted blood in the way. . . “She drowned.”

“More like choked, but basically, yeah.”

“How do you know this didn’t happen after she died?”

“Post-mortem clots look different,” says Eiji, gesturing at the mess of fat, dead flesh, and sticky gobs of browning blood. 

The one that came out of the pulmonary vessel has a more defined shape, but maybe the ones in the heart had been perfect molds as well before Eiji stuck a pair of scissors, and then his fingers, into them. 

“They’re different, I swear,” says Eiji. “Come on, walk around to this side. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

Itachi walks around the table without taking his eyes off the mess of clots on and around the opened heart. 

“These,” says Eiji, pointing at the granules on the right atrium, “probably happened after she died. See how it’s all mostly the same color? And this,” he points at the clot that came out of the pulmonary artery, “is made up of circular rings. See how its rings are in different shades of red?”

Itachi has been focused on the shapes, not the seemingly random variations in color. He leans down, narrows his eyes, then leans even closer. The stink of copper gets stronger, but he spots the thin arches in a deeper red, like lines from the finest calligraphy pen, going through the biggest clot.

“I see.” How embarrassing. A random chuunin of middling skill has a keener gaze than him. 

“Yeah, that’s an organizing clot,” says Eiji. “It formed, the body tried to lyse it, then another clot formed on top of it. And the blood flowed past it for a while, so it took the tube-like shape all around the walls of the artery, and. . . I’m not explaining this very well, am I?”

“No, but I get the idea.” _The blood flowed past it_ and _tube-like shape_ give it away. Itachi looks at the rest of the clots. They’re just clumps of matted blood in random aggregates, like rice that’s been left out during the rain, then left alone to dry. There’s no order. No _organization_ , to borrow one of the words Eiji had thrown around so casually. “I didn’t do this.”

“Not unless you found a way to terrorize platelets, no.” 

The revelation is flat. The knot in his stomach that he’s been trying to ignore doesn’t loosen. 

“It’s alright, Captain.” Eiji pats his shoulder with the back of his hand. “She was gonna die with or without you. No need to feel guilty.”

“I don’t feel guilty.” Just anxious that his Sharingan, bathed in Shisui’s blood, had finally driven him mad. 

“Whatever, let’s just—Did we weigh the brain?”

“No.”

“Ah, shit.” Eiji sighs. “Go do that, and I’ll finish eviscerating.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a nasty cold and I have to go to work tomorrow. God help me. Excuse typos in this.

A sharp stink reminiscent of disinfectants hits Itachi’s face when he opens the bucket with the brain. His eyes water as he reaches inside the clear liquid, tinged red with the minimal blood on the brain’s surface, but he refuses to look away. The brain is softer than he expected, like jello held together by a thin membrane. He fears that he might deform it, bt lifts it out of the formalin regardless. Placing it on the scale is a delicate process, though probably only because he’s afraid of destroying it. 

One-thousand-two-hundred-and-three grams. 

Itachi grabs the brain, more confident this time, and slides it back onto the bucket. The stink remains after he pushes the lid in place, even after he walks towards the whiteboard to note the brain’s weight. Fumes must be trapped between his face and the plastic facemask. He would rip it off his head, but his hands are dirty from messing with the scalp, and the woman’s eviscerated chest. And the brain. 

“Are we done, then?” he asks Eiji.

“Not technically,” says Eiji. “Since we’re here, let’s just finish. You said she was holding her stomach, right?”

“Yes.” The upper half, close to her chest.

“Two ANBU shifts says we’re about to hit the jackpot,” says Eiji, lifting the sheet of yellow, bubbly fat off the woman’s entrails.

“You couldn’t cover for me at ANBU.”

“And you couldn’t cover for me either, but that’s not the point.” Eiji grunts without looking his way. Itachi can practically see his eyes rolling. “It’s called a figure of speech, asshole. Bring me a piece of string.”

Unsure of how much is needed, Itachi rips off about a meter, then walks to the table. Eiji fishes around the entrails, separating the tubular part from the yellow fat attaching it to the wall of the abdomen, closer to the end near the stomach. 

“Wrap the string around the intestine,” orders Eiji. 

Itachi steps closer to Eiji, close enough that he can feel the heat emanating off his body, then slips the string around the piece of intestine. Finally, his eyes stop itching, perhaps distracted by the coppery scent of blood permeating the air around the body. He ties the string, as he would tie the knot around a captured enemy’s wrist.

“Not like—”

“—What?” Itachi rarely uses ties. His genjutsu are the best restraints in the world.

“It doesn’t matter; not like it’s a real surgery. Just tie the knot, then make another one an inch or so away.”

Itachi almost argues. Whatever it is, he’s sure he can learn it in a matter of seconds. But he’s already inconvenienced Eiji enough, and he’s right. It’s not like it matters in the long run. 

Once the knots are done, Itachi steps a little to the side. Eiji grabs a pair of scissors and cuts between the strings.

Moss-green, watery fluid escaped from the intestine a moment before the room reeks of vomit admixed with. . . well. Shit. Itachi takes an extra step backwards, relieved that the smell starts dissipating as quickly as it spread. Eiji puts the scissors aside, then reaches for his scalpel. He slices through the yellowish fat as he pulls on the entrails, out of the abdomen, swiftly and with a degree of coordination that Itachi knows instinctively is much harder than it looks. 

Eiji places the tail end of the intestines in the bucket without the red trash bag, then continues cutting away the fat. Pulling and slicing, pulling and slicing. Somewhere, Itachi learned that a human’s guts are longer than their full height when stretched out, but seeing it plain as day is something else. The woman is—was about as tall as him, and Eiji’s got a bucket half-full of her guts before he reaches the part where the colon probably starts. 

“If you were a real assistant,” whines, Eiji, “you’d be doing this for me.”

“I could,” says Itachi, though he has no desire to do so.

“Whatever, I already started and can finish much faster.”

It honestly doesn’t look that complicated, but Itachi sees no need to score points about whether or not he can eviscerate a corpse faster than a medic-nin. All his indignation evaporates when Eiji reaches the end of the line with the intestines, then reaches into the woman’s pelvis. His hand wiggles around, making sounds identical to those of a kitchen sink as it drains, then he slips the scalpel under the woman’s pubic bone, just over the hand that’s making all the unfortunate noises. With a grunt, Eiji moves the blade around, pulling with his other hand at the same time. 

Itachi fights an urge to skitter away, frowning at himself. He’s supposed to be Konoha’s most vicious killer, and there he is, cringing at a routine autopsy. 

In a few moments, Eiji lets out a satisfied grunt and pulls his fist out of the body’s pelvis with a mess of fat, pink-reddish muscle-like tissue, and the other end of the woman’s in colon in hand. Browning droplets of blood drip off the meat as Eiji throws it onto the bucket with the guts, gaze fixed on the body and the hollow cave where its abdominal organs used to be. 

For the first time, Itachi gets what all the protective gear is for. Eiji’s front is soaked, mostly with the clear fluid of the body’s abdomen. Except for his hands, which are covered in brownish blood and red droplets all the way to his elbows. Even his face mask has a few red tracks on it.

“Do we care about the uterus and ovaries?” asks Eiji, frowning down at the empty pelvis.

“No?” says Itachi. He certainly doesn’t, but Eiji had intimated that he wanted to finish the full autopsy.

“Eh, me neither,” says Eiji, turning to the gut bucket. “Let me just get this part over with. . .” He grabs the bucket, and goes towards the sink a little bit off from the autopsy table. “Get me the hooked scissors. Those probably have a special name, but I forgot what it is, so fuck it.”

Itachi assumes they’re the large pair with a dull tip and a hook at the end. He takes it off the table by the whiteboard and walks around the sink to stand in front of Eiji. 

“You don’t have to stand so close for this, sir,” says Eiji, opening the faucet. 

Maybe not, but Itachi refuses to balk like some genin who’s never seen a warzone.

“Seriously,” says Eiji, fishing around for the edge of the colon. “This is probably the only part of this job that never gets any easier.”

Itachi stares at him.

“Suit yourself,” says Eiji, shrugging, nicking the colon.

He slips the scalpel into one of the holes around the table, then reaches for the scissors. The ensuing stink is somehow worse than a rotting body, which Itachi has endured a few times during ANBU patrolling shifts. It’s rancid, accentuated by the sight of watery stool, ranging from yellowish and bile-like to brown so dark that it pushes black, spilling into the running water as Eiji advances with the hooked scissors. The bowel occasionally tries to slip off the scissors, but gets trapped in the hook every time. Itachi spots a piece of an undigested onion floating with the shit and almost gags. 

“And. . .” says Eiji, pushing into the uncut portion of the tube with his fingers. “Found it. People are so predictable.”

“Found what?”

Instead of responding, Eiji pulls out long, slim, blue plastic bag from the colon. “Get an empty bucket.”

Itachi welcomes the excuse to flee from the faucet, though the stink of shit follows him around the room, as though it’s permeated into his hair. Or his disposable scrubs. He grabs an empty white bucket off a shelf and forces himself to go back to the sink, wrinkling his nose. A bead of sweat has condensed at the tip of it, and he has little choice but to try and rub it off with his upper lip.

“Although, that’s a lot of condoms,” Eiji says, as Itachi rips the cap off the bucket.

“Those are condoms?” He’s deposited three of the slim tubes onto the flat surface beside the sink.

“Captain, you don’t know what a condom looks like?” Eiji advances the hooked scissors, then extracts two more blue bags out of the shit. “Am I gonna have to check you for foul discharge with a painful, burning sensation?”

“I’ve never seen one ripped out of someone’s intestines before.”

“Right, right. You’re an ANBU attack dog, not the poor bastard who has to recover smuggled drugs out of people’s asses. This is the same idea. Take your product, put it inside a condom, tie it off _real_ good—and I mean real good—swallow, travel to Point B, and take a shitload of laxatives.”

“The Hyuuga would see through it.” Or so Itachi assumes. 

“Yeah, all the time. Honestly, is it really that surprising? You’ve been in ANBU for two years and you’ve never seen this?”

“I get it now. I’ve heard of it, just never seen it first-hand.”

“Shit, they really just have you running assassinations, don’t they?” 

“I’m good at it.”

“Hah, hah,” says Eiji, a little too nervous for Itachi’s taste. It’s not like he means that as a threat. “Just gather theses and start cleaning them up. I bet a whole bunch are gonna be stuck on the sigmoid.” 

Once or twice, Itachi has to dip his hand into the shit-infested water to get the makeshift condom bags. The water isn’t draining quickly enough for Itachi’s tastes, but he’s not sure what to do about it. Eiji notices the problem and sinks his hand into the water, waves it around over the drain, and the water starts draining faster.  
“Y’know,” says Eiji, grabbing the hooked scissors, “the first ex-lap I ever did was on this girl who swallowed a vial full of speed. Not even special speed; just the regular, watered-down shit you find in the smelliest alley back in The District. Then she gets into some kind of a fistfight with another civilian, and somehow, the glass vial breaks in her stomach. And I mean shatters. Took me three hours to get all the pieces out. She didn’t even have the good decency to freaking die after she perfed. I was just gonna let her bleed out.”

“Why didn’t you?” asks Itachi, for once hoping Eiji will keep on rambling. He needs any distraction possible to escape the stink.

“What?”

“Why didn’t you let her bleed out?” clarifies Itachi, annoyed that it needed clarification.

“Because. . . Because!” Eiji grunts as he reached a constriction in the tube, and forces the scissors past them. “You don’t just do every little thing that pops into your head.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m asking why you didn’t do a very specific thing.”

“Because.” He moves the scissors with more ease now that he’s on the narrow portion of intestines. “It’d have been wrong. If it was me on that table, I wouldn’t want my surgeon to throw a hissy fit and let me die.”

“So you did it for you.” 

“I guess,” shrugs Eiji. “Why else do we do anything?”

“Why are you helping me with this?” Itachi assumes that he expects something in return, even if he doesn’t know what it is.

“I hate clinic,” says Eiji. “People complain about too much random shit. Back pain is the worst. Seriously, it should be illegal to whine about lower back pain. You have back pain because you’re old and your body hates you! Take some NSAIDs and leave me alone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here. My ad revenue is up to 8 bucks. After almost a year. I'm well on my way to google stardom.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a tough month at work, to put it mildly. But I've been slowy chipping at this fic and here we go.
> 
> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading

After Eiji has cleaned the bowels of the drugs, he washes the inside of it, inch by painstaking inch, looking for something that Itachi doesn’t have the faintest idea about. He almost asks about it, but he doesn’t want to slow Eiji down. The smell isn’t getting any better, and the sounds of the open faucets are giving him a headache. He thinks back to the last time he slept, and his stomach sinks. At least sixty hours ago, and he has an ANBU night shift coming up tonight.

The shit must be washed off the condoms because the toxicology med-nins will take the drugs and modify them into weapons or medicines, depending on what they are. It gives Itachi something to do, at least. Besides, it’s far from the dirtiest job Itachi has had to do.

“Wash them with bleach, then with water,” Eiji orders, as he cuts off a piece of the bowels with the scissors and dumps it into a separate bucket of formalin. The rest, he maneuvers into the red trash bag over on the table with the body. “Toxicology is really finicky about contaminations, and they’re paranoid that Orochimaru’s cutting his drugs with toxins so we can’t use them. That would kill his clients faster and cost him money, so I think probably not, but what do I know?”

From what Itachi has read about the man, Orochimaru despises Konoha and would happily hinder his own plans to poison its well. It’s feasible that he would damage his own business in order to hurt them, and since he has literally experimented on human babies, concern for the people using his product is probably not hindering him either. There’s very few people alive that Itachi has the moral high ground on, and Orochimaru is definitely one of them.

“The rest shouldn’t take long,” says Eiji, reaching for the scalpel he’d slipped into one of the holes on the rims of the autopsy table. “I’ll do this organ by organ.”

Itachi finishes with the condoms and walks back to stand on the other side of the autopsy table, idiotically bereft at no longer having a clear task to complete. His hands half-curl when Eiji’s long fingers grasp the fat, opened vessels leading to the heart. The water and bleach are cool over his gloves, and it makes the bones of his hands ache, as though he is an old, arthritic man. Eiji slices through the blood vessels, pushes his hand deeper into the body’s chest, and cuts through a series of arteries and veins that Itachi had not noticed under the blood clots and meat.

“Here, weigh it,” says Eiji, pulling the heart out of the woman’s chest.

The bottom surface is slightly wetter than the top part. Itachi is briefly concerned that the heart will slip off his ammonia-soaked gloves, which would be the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to him; then he remembers that it’s a dead heart and grasps it more firmly. By the time he has placed the heart on the scale, walked over and recorded the weight (two-hundred-and-sixty-five grams) on the board, Eiji has cut out one of the lungs.

Without being asked, Itachi reaches for the bluish organ, wondering if black stains on its surface will scratch the pads of his fingers. Once again, the texture surprises him. Not like muscle or meat at all, but the smoothest sponge he’s ever touched, even over the black bruises. Despite the apparent fragility, squeezing it doesn’t disturb its overall contours. It’s the closest he’ll ever come to holding air, Wind Release aside. The tube that had connected to the trachea is flexible, except for the thin rings of cartilage that give it shape. After placing it on the scale, Itachi runs his index finger into the fissure that separates one lobe from the other and scoops out a glob of coagulated blood from the crevasse.

“What’s taking so long over there, Captain?” Eiji complains.

Embarrassed, Itachi memorizes the weight and takes it back to the autopsy table. Eiji’s ripped the other lung out of the body, and he’s cutting through the bronchus, opening it up like a tree. The lung looks darker on the inside, and even more like a sponge riddled with holes. Near the root of the branches, gunk too black to be called clotted blood adheres to the surface, some of it smooth and peanut-shaped, and the rest stuck to the fat and cartilage like moss growing on a wet, rotting tree trunk. Itachi has no idea if they’re supposed to look like that or not, and for once Eiji’s not giving the slightest hint of his thoughts.

“What are these?” Itachi asks, as he takes the lung from Eiji’s hand.

“What?” Eiji looks as Itachi squeezes one of the rounder studs. “Lymph nodes. And yeah, some are kinda big, but who cares? Infection or occult lymphoma, or whatever. It’s not what killed her.”

After Eiji finishes with the lungs, he cuts off the sheet of muscle that makes up the diaphragm, grunting about what an annoyance it always is, then moves on to the liver.

Though it looks like reddish-yellow jello, it’s probably the strongest organ that Itachi has handled yet. And the heaviest. Stuck to the bottom of it is a little balloon filled with yellowish fluid. Itachi almost asks about that too, but Eiji’s focused on peeling a fleshy tube (the esophagus, probably) off of what’s left of the trachea. The woman’s chest is nearly empty, like the carapace of a giant insect.

“Get one of the longer blades in this drawer,” says Eiji, reaching the spot where the esophagus pierces what’s left of the diaphragm, “and slice the liver into one-centimeter sections. Check for masses, or anything that looks weird; you probably won’t find anything. Save me a small piece of it.”

Considering how swiftly and smoothly Itachi has plunged a kunai into an enemy’s liver (angling the blade upwards to get under the ribs), Itachi doesn’t expect the organ to resist being cut so much. Perhaps it’s because he’s not using chakra, or because he’s determined to get slim, even cutlets, as though he’s planning to cook them for finicky guests who’ll judge not only their meal’s taste, but also its presentation. He looks at the cut surfaces after he’s done, trying his best to reason out if the pink/red smoothness is normal. There are holes, but their lining is smooth, tan, and organized, so Itachi assumes that they are blood vessels.

“Good,” says Eiji, glancing over at Itachi’s work. He takes a handful of seconds to flip through the cutlets, then goes back to the corpse’s opened abdomen, wraps his right hand over a dark, smooth, solid organ with a glistening, reddish, almost-black surface, and slices the vessels keeping it loosely attached to the abdominal cavity. “Here.” He hands Itachi the organ. “Giant lymph node.”

“Like the ones in the lungs?” Itachi grabs it, expecting it to be as tough as the liver, but its consistency is much closer to that of jello.

“No,” says Eiji, chuckling. “Well, kinda. It’s the spleen. I need a fresh weight. Then slice it to pieces so we can save a sample. Like how you did the liver.”

The spleen feels like a fruit with a thin membrane holding together water. Red fluid too thin to be called blood flows from the organ as he cuts into it, and the sections seem to collapse in on themselves. The capsule wrinkles as reddish pulp spreads on the cutting board.

“Hmph,” says Eiji.

Itachi stops cutting.

“Whatever; it’s not what killed her,” says Eiji, without giving Itachi further instructions. He goes back to cutting, and Itachi bites back a stream of questions.

The rest of the autopsy proceeds in a similar fashion: Eiji slices organs out of body cavities, passes them to Itachi with curt instructions, mumbling about how it doesn’t matter because “it’s not what killed her”. Itachi guesses there must be abnormalities that he doesn’t recognize, but he swallows his questions and does as he’s told. Symbolic as the situation might be, Eiji is his superior officer in a medical context, and there’s nothing more annoying than a subordinate who won’t just keep quiet and do as he’s told.

So he weighs the organs, slices them into thin stripes, then puts the pieces Eiji selects in a small bucket of formalin.

“We’re good, Captain,” says Eiji, trying to scratch his ear with his shoulder. There’s a fleck of dried blood on his upper sleeve, but Itachi figures there’s no reason to point that out. “The iliacs were clean, so we didn’t really find the original thrombus, but whatever. The saddle embolus wasn’t a mirage, so fuck it. Let’s close her up.”

Itachi understood a fraction of all that, but his headache is intensifying and he’s already decided to keep his questions to himself anyway. All his curiosity would have to wait until the stars align to give him a vacation that he can spend reading.

They gather what’s left of the organs and the bits of fat strewn all over the autopsy table, then dump them into the heavy-duty red trash bag between the woman’s thighs. Eiji ties a hasty knot and deposits the bag on the woman’s opened abdomen, forcing in the bits spilling over the strips of skin, fat, and muscle that used to be her belly. She had been relatively thin. Her organs, even cut to pieces, will not fit.

Eiji molds the trash bag between the shell of the woman’s ribcage, then groans. “Forgot about the spinal cord.” He sighs, glaring down at the cadaver. “Fuck it.” Muttering to himself, Eiji turns towards the table by the blackboard and grabs the sewing hooks and a long segment of string.

The bag does fit back into the body’s cavities. It makes sense, Itachi supposes, though he can’t help but be a little surprised. Sure, the organs had all fit in there once, but there had been an order. He’s seen fellow ninja incensed because they can’t shove their supplies into a rucksack without neatly folding everything into place first.

“Now we clean up,” says Eiji, sighing, “which sometimes takes as long as the damned autopsy itself.”

Most of the time, Itachi finds cleaning soothing. Not so much now. The water is too cold, and the sound of it streaming over the autopsy table is like a sandpaper rubbing at his eardrums. His vision threatens to blur, and he’s aware of every single slide of his eyelids over his eyes. Hot air gets trapped behind his paper mask. For an instant, Itachi imagines himself running out of the room and ripping off all the restrictive medical gear.

Eiji keeps blathering as he cleans; nonsense about food and missions that Itachi doesn’t have enough energy to process. His voice should add to the crowd of grating annoyances, but it doesn’t. It’s a deep baritone that makes Eiji sound stronger and older than he actually is, and Itachi finds himself daydreaming that he’s imparting some wisdom about resilience and determination as they clean surgical instruments. The ANBU night shift still looms over him. He should. . . Well, he can’t just tell Eiji that he’s too fragile a flower to finish the autopsy and do his job.

“Finally, we can take all this shit off,” says Eiji, after they transfer the body to a gurney. It’s still, obviously, and its breasts are misaligned on its chest because Eiji did not care much about cosmetics when closing the Y-incision.

Eiji hums a happy tune as he wheels the body out of the room, mood as mercurial as ever. Itachi squeezes his eyes shut the moment he’s alone and rips off his gloves. A thin, invisible film of sweat has formed over his fingers. His nose itches, but he refuses to touch his face until after he’s washed his hands with antibacterial soap. What if the water-diluted shit has seeped through the gloves?

“There’s a shower,” says Eiji, when he returns to the autopsy room, already divested of the disposable surgical gowns. “Only one, so I’ll make it quick.”

For an insane second, Itachi considers suggesting that they share, but even he knows that most people value their privacy too much to see the practicality in sharing a shower. He settles for washing his hands in the sink by the door, while Eiji leaves for the single bathroom. The cold makes the joints of his fingers ache, but it washes the grime he cannot see off his skin. A dull, throbbing headache is settling behind his eyes, making him seriously consider sending a clone to take over his next ANBU shift. It’s only patrolling, after all. He leaves the autopsy room and leans against the wall just outside to wait for Eiji, then gives in to the urge to rub his eyes.

The answer he had prayed for does not make him feel any better, and it really should. In a way, it works in his favor that an enemy ninja had died of natural causes while under one of his genjutsu. Rumors will fly that he’s so powerful that he can kill people with his mind, and no ninja spits in the face of exaggerated reports about their power. The less people that are willing to risk fighting him, the better.

But it seems like such an insignificant detail. People already think he’s a monster. He should have gone home after the mission and slept, or just avoided going underground where the crows would have a harder time reaching him.

“Make sure to grab your clothes before going in there.”

Itachi doesn’t react, but he’s startled. If Eiji sauntering out of the bathroom at the end of the hallway startles him, then Itachi must be more exhausted than he thought.

Eiji towels his dark hair obliviously, or so Itachi hopes. “I was gonna head to the clinic to help the other medics finish up,” he says, passing the damp towel to Itachi, “but why be a slack-off asshole halfway? They’re probably livid at me anyway, so I’m gonna take the rest of the afternoon off. Do you want me to wait for you, sir?”

“Yes.” Itachi blinks, certain that he meant to say ‘no’. It’s at least five hours before his next ANBU shift. Enough time to meditate, if not outright sleep.

“Alright,” says Eiji, stretching. “Since you owe me, we can go to a fancy jounin restaurant that I can’t afford. If anyone asks, I wanted to go back to the clinic but you asked me to go out with you and I was too intimidated to say no.”

That sounds like a terrible excuse on several levels, but Itachi doesn’t have it in him to get into another circular argument with Eiji. He goes to retrieve his clothes, mentally arguing with himself about it anyway. No one would really believe that Itachi intimidates Eiji, considering all the back-talk the idiot indulges in during missions (though Itachi admits that it’s partly his fault for allowing it). If Eiji had an ounce of sense, he’d know how dangerous it would be to spread rumors about having any kind of relationship with Itachi.

The showerhead is a finicky one, so he accidentally opens the cold water faucet. Though the water only grazes his forearm, it’s enough to remind him that Nakano’s water had been cold that night.

Itachi gasps, shakes his head, and then starts removing the flimsy disposable scrubs. Those memories are pointless self-flagellation, but he can’t block them when he’s so tired. The thoughts circle around his head like hungry sharks: how brave Shisui must have been, how scared, and how painful it would be to breathe in cold water, dirty with seaweed and blood coming from his empty eye sockets. He wonders how Shisui’s lungs had looked when the medic-nin who performed his autopsy cut them out of his chest and sliced them to ribbons.

Perhaps he should ask Eiji what is typical of a drowning victim’s autopsy during their impromptu, ill-advised date.

Well, Eiji probably isn’t thinking of it in those terms.

Itachi sets the water as hot as he can without burning himself. The soap is cheap and grainy, but a faint scratch helps ground him. Though there’s a bottle of unlabeled shampoo in one corner, he rubs the soap onto his scalp. Come to think of it, he’s not sure when he last ate. Maybe he’ll feel better after eating something scrumptious at Konoha’s best restaurant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here, though I'm not sure if I've posted anything new this month. I'm tired.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finally done! Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading. This was supposed to be a thank-you/birthday present to her, but it's months and months late because work blahblah. Thanks to her for beta-reading not just this story, but the most of what I've written for this past year. Without her support, I definitely wouldn't have finished as much as I did.

“I can’t believe I’m gonna get to see how the other half lives!” Eiji says, all but skipping ahead of Itachi on the street.

Civilians are taking their lunch break and spilling out into the public streets like gnats. It’s a perfect time for an assassin to melt into the crowd, track down a target, and follow them into some sequestered nook in a street somewhere. They wouldn’t be missed until the next day at the least, giving anyone competent enough time to vanish into any other anonymous crowd.

“I can hunt some pretty big boars now, or just kill some cow from an outskirt town away from the village if I’m feeling like a dick.”

Itachi’s having trouble sorting out the constant skitter of footsteps around them, much less following Eiji’s inane train of thought.

“But cooking?” Eiji snorts. “You can’t steal or terrorize cooking skills out of anyone, or the right spices and salts and shit, and there’s no way I’m crazy enough to kidnap a chef or something.”

“So you want steak,” says Itachi, squeezing his eyes shut as a villager wearing cheap earrings passes by them. Some random light reflects off a gaudy false ruby and hits his eyes, and he swears he can feel it passing through his eyelids.

“Oh, who knows what I want,” says Eiji. “I feel like I’m wasting a huge favor here. I should be making you pay a fancy geisha to—”

The silence is abrupt. Itachi glances up at Eiji’s face, always naked with emotion, and resists an impulse to brush a few stray locks of brown hair away from his eyes.

“Never mind.” Eiji grabs Itachi’s wrist.

Itachi pictures how easily he could pull Eiji’s arm right out of its elbow. But he doesn’t take his hand back, or even feel any real inclination to do so.

“I know where I wanna go,” says Eiji.

He doesn’t choose the best restaurant in Konoha. He chooses the most expensive one, which might be its own mark of merit. They always have a pretty singer inside, and Itachi can’t stand it even on his good days. He still has enough wits left to admire the decorative symmetry of the whole affair, at least. The singer’s egg-yolk yellow kimono contrasts with the mahogany furniture, which glows under the light of candles that probably don’t need to be lighted in the middle of the day.

No offense to the woman’s voice, but Itachi would prefer to eat in silence. He would demand that she not sing until he’s gone, and the server would probably see to it, but Eiji’s looking at the stage with a dopey smile, and swaying in time with the music. They’re here for him, supposedly, so why not let him enjoy the place as it’s meant to be enjoyed?

If he’d cared about the server’s assessing look and judgmental frown when they arrived, Eiji hides it pretty well. It’s one thing to show up at the place in a simple jounin standard uniform, as Itachi, and another thing entirely to shamble in wearing hospital rags. Unbidden and stupidly, Itachi imagines taking Eiji back to the Uchiha compound for some important cousin’s birthday, preferably dressed as he is now. Flimsy black scrubs and sneakers stained with old, dried specks of blood. Caked, whitish fluid over his shirt collar that Itachi prays isn’t some kind of pus.

Eiji catches him staring, though it’s more accurate to say that Itachi lets him catch him staring. He expects the resulting frown, but not the subsequent grin.

“I’m gonna start doing that too,” says Eiji, looking back to the stage. “Just look at people all dead-eyed, and see how long until someone punches me in the face.”

“Sorry,” says Itachi. Then he frowns because when the hell was the last time he ever said that?

Eiji shrugs. “Can you do an autopsy now that you’ve seen me do one?”

“Did you see me activate my Sharingan?”

“No, but it’s not like I was gazing at you soulfully all morning.”

“I thought I was staring at you all dead-eyed,” says Itachi.

“What?” Eiji frowns. “Oh. Man, like my jabs would ever be that indirect.”

Itachi nods. “I couldn’t do an autopsy,” he admits. “I only have a vague idea of what you were looking for.”

“How does it work anyway?” Eiji leans forward. “It’s not like jutsu are any less complicated than an autopsy, and the Sharingan copies those just fine.”

“You realize that you’re asking me to divulge family secrets.”

“Well, excuse me for thinking you might not give a fuck about your family.”

Itachi’s pretty sure that he doesn’t react to that gem, but Eiji’s face runs through a hilarious gamut of expressions anyway. His eyes widen, his mouth drops and he leans back, then tries to cover his mouth with his hand, shocked as if Itachi had been the one to make a funeral pyre with his manners.

The waiter returns with their orders. Eiji’s gaze flies to the food, then back to Itachi, then to the waiter. He babbles something about the delicious smell, reaching for a pair of chopsticks before his plate is even on the table. The waiter gets that sour look on his face again, but Eiji is either oblivious or doesn’t care. But he still won’t look Itachi in the eye, not even after the waiter leaves.

“Did I actually say that last thing out loud?” he asks, so earnest that Itachi can’t tell if the question is rhetorical or not.

“I think the people at the next table heard you.” Probably not, but one of the women won’t stop stealing looks their way. Itachi knows he looks fairly anonymous, so it’s Eiji that’s attracting attention.

“So. . .” Eiji looks around the restaurant, past the swaying singer and to the pictures hanging on the wall behind her.

The largest one depicts Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha eating by the window, Hashirama smiling and Madara looking suspicious and smug. Or smugly suspicious. There’d been talk of getting rid of all images of Madara once, but the Fourth had rightly argued that doing so would elevate the man to martyrdom.

“He kinda looks like you,” Eiji says, shoulders tense. “If you squint.”

“You don’t really need to squint.” Though strong, it’s still a superficial resemblance. Madara, even in pictures, reeks of charisma, while Itachi fades into the background even though most of the village is terrified of him.

Eiji opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a loud sigh. He gives his food a mournful look and puts the chopsticks down.

“Please, unclench,” says Itachi. “I’m not flying into a rage.”

“Why not?” Eiji grabs the chopsticks, struggles with the steak for a second, then tosses them aside and grabs the meat with his bare hand, ignoring the fork and knife that the waiter left behind.

“Most people won’t even look at me,” says Itachi, “but you’re willing to have lunch with me in public.” That’s not why he isn’t angry, though. He did commit an unspeakable sin. It’s only fair that it will follow him to his grave and beyond. He doubts any business in Konoha will be hanging his picture decades after his death.

“Most people are hypocrites,” says Eiji, ripping into the steak, licking at the fat and sucking on a piece of bone sticking out from a corner.

Itachi feels his lips twitching. “But not you?”

“Oh, I’m a hypocrite about a million things,” says Eiji, shrugging. “Just not about you.”

“No?”

“You’re weird, your face muscles don’t function that well, and you’re an arrogant dipshit,” says Eiji, sucking up a drop of fat that falls on his wrist and licking his lips. Somewhere, the hostess is having palpitations. “But you stay out of people’s way and do your job. What more do you need from a person? Aren’t you gonna touch your food?”

He can barely stand the smell of it. “. . .I couldn’t do an autopsy, even if I had copied you with my Sharingan.”

“No?”

“The Sharingan copies motion perfectly, but not context or purpose,” explains Itachi, for reasons he cannot begin to fathom. “I would stumble the first time I ran into a different-sized body.”

“Oh.” Eiji beams, and wipes glistening fat off his lips. “So you didn’t learn to draw in like ‘a couple of seconds’.”

“No,” admits Itachi. “A few months.”

“Look at you talking yourself up, Captain,” says Eiji, grinning from ear to ear. “You’re human, after all.”

The jab hits Itachi, even if Eiji doesn’t mean anything by it. Of course he’s human. No amount of praying on his part will change that.

“And now you know more about the Sharingan than almost anyone who isn’t an Uchiha,” says Itachi, hoping Eiji will take that as the warning that it is. “More than quite a few Uchiha, actually.”

“Well, that sounds alarming.”

Itachi smiles. Not as stupid as he looks, then. Not all the time. “You’ll be fine as long as you don’t go bragging about how I tell you things.”

“Eh, nobody would believe me.”

Probably not, but it’s not the kind of thing Itachi should be sharing, least of all with a classless medic who yelps and frowns in the middle of missions like the screechy heroine of one of those idiot movies Kakashi keeps dragging him to.

“Sir?”

Damn it, but his head is pounding. The waiter’s coming their way, but Itachi glares and sends him scurrying off. Which is a shame since Itachi wants his side of the table cleared. Eiji better finish devouring his meal soon.

“Sir, don’t take this the wrong way,” says Eiji, dropping the steak and reaching for a napkin, “but you’re starting to look like shit.”

Now, that’s alarming. Itachi’s supposed to be able to withstand torture (though no one’s ever been strong enough to manage that; not physically, anyway). How’s a little headache alerting someone as inattentive as Eiji that something’s wrong? Itachi squeezes his eyes shut. Just for a little bit. He needs some darkness.

“Hold on a second,” says Eiji.

Then, failing to gauge the goddamned situation, he leans forward and lays his palm over Itachi’s head. The same greasy palm he’d ‘cleaned’ with a napkin, and as Itachi considers breaking his wrist a hundred different ways, Eiji suffuses his hand with chakra.

He has to be cognitively impaired.

Itachi should kill him.

“Shit, you’re febrile,” says Eiji. The chakra recedes, but then he. . . caresses the side of Itachi’s face, rests his hand on Itachi’s chin, and pulls Itachi’s bottom lip down with his thumb.

Itachi stares, dumbfounded.

“Let’s take this shit to go,” says Eiji, finally taking his hand off Itachi’s face.

Itachi supposes it would be an overreaction to attack him _now._

“I’m gonna take you home, take your vitals, and stay with you for a while,” says Eiji, as though he has any right to be giving Itachi orders. “You’re not on duty tonight, are you?”

“I’m patrolling.”

Eiji dismisses that with a handwave. “The drunks will be spared your gentle touch tonight. Looks like you have some viral shit. No need to waste the ED’s time yet.”

Before Itachi can decide how to call him on his presumptuousness, Eiji’s waving the waiter over.

Well, it’s an excuse to get out of a patrolling shift, if nothing else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here. I've posted a bit about my job this week.

**Author's Note:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


End file.
